Puzzle Pieces

Someone I used to know wrote this post somewhere in the past twelve hours.  I don't imagine she remembers me, or not terribly well at least, so it feels like an invasion of her privacy to post that URL here so obviously.  In reading her blog somewhere around four years, now, after the last time I saw her, I find a lot more similarities than I did then.  Part of it is the music.  That might have been what made me curious enough to read her writing in the first place.

But there's something else there, too.  There's the much more subtle yet significant struggle for clear thinking, for making sense of things, for confidence.  And she seems to be a good ways ahead of me in that respect.  Not that it's really much of a surprise.  I wish I'd gotten to know her better when I could have.  Maybe I'd have turned out differently as a result, maybe I would have been more like her, which seems like anything but a bad thing to me right now.  And maybe I'd have fallen into different holes, or fewer, because it seems like we had a lot of those in common by the end, anyway.

I never had this semblance of individual identity.  Growing up, my room defied all psychological theorists.  Unlike most people, I never had a single picture of a person on my walls.  Even when I was twelve and picking out how I wanted my personal space to look, I oriented the idea around the way my parents put their house together--clean, simple, elegant, and sophisticated.  Yes, I was twelve.  I wonder sometimes if this rigid adherence to striving to make myself mature too early didn't deprive me of a sense of identity I could have had.

My taste in music didn't develop until a few years ago because until then, I never really listened to music...at all (which is hard to believe, given some of the people I spend most of my time with).  I never spent my time on the internet, and still don't spend as much as most people I know.  I miss all the trends, disregard all the passing fancies, and am very careful to never really commit myself to anything permanent because I'm constantly too busy being afraid of losing it all.

I never fit into cliques or stereotypes.  I spent most of my time feeling out of place even in a group of so-called friends because I was always too busy being detached to be interested, or my interests lay elsewhere and I still hung around because I didn't want to be that-one-kid-in-the-corner-who-has-no-friends.  Mentally, emotionally, though, that's exactly who I've become.

Even if I wanted to pick some interests, build myself an identity now, it's too late.  It feels like taking anyone else's interests and saying 'I like this,' building some core tenets of myself to reflect this fact, is cheating.  That it wasn't my interest and that whoever showed it to me will think I'm cheap and fake and worthless because I have to take something of theirs in order to be anything on my own.

I'm disinterested and I automatically disengage.  People offer no further appeal, mostly because I'm just too scared of having nothing to talk to them about and being hated for anything I do say.  That's just how it's been for me.  I don't avoid people because I don't want friends, I avoid them because I don't think I'm good enough to be considered a friend, because I'm not interesting enough to be worth talking to, because I'm too weird to want to be seen with.  And somehow, masochistic loneliness is easier to bear than rejection.